Re: Welcome, and introductions

Chris Lilley wrote:

 > So, to kick things off, please send a mail to this list introducing
 > yourself - what is your background, what are your hopes for this
 > WG, what is your level of existing W3C experience (e.g. other WGs).
 > Also, what time zone you are in (which will help us plan a suitable
 > teleconference time).

I'm Håkon Wium Lie, CTO of Opera Software. I represent Opera in the
CSS WG, and in this WG. Before I joined Opera in 1998, I worked for
W3C in Sophia-Antipolis. Before W3C, I worked at CERN where I proposed
CSS in 1994 [1]

With Chris, Bert and others I worked on adding WebFonts to CSS. We
had a W3C Fonts WG in 1996 [2]. Alas, fonts were not interoperably
implemented by browsers back then and the millenium passed. 

In 2005 I thought it was time to try again, and I launched a
campaign to make use of the "untapped resource for web-based
publishing" which was out there [3]. I joined the board to YesLogic
and pushed Prince [4] to implement support for Truetype WebFonts. And
in 2007 I wrote an article to spur browsers to do the same [5].

I've had many font discussions with people over the years. We've
argued about embedding bits, the quality of free fonts, business
models for web fonts, subsetting and the likes. But the underlying
problem has always been that we couldn't agree on a common font
format. With the forming of this WG, the situation seems to have
changed. This is good news for the web, and I look forward to
participating.

I hope to create a font family in my lifetime.

I'm based in Oslo, Norway. 

[1] http://www.w3.org/People/howcome/p/cascade.html
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-fonts-wg/
[3] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-css-wg/2005OctDec/0191.html
[4] http://www.princexml.com
[5] http://www.alistapart.com/articles/cssatten

Cheers,

-h&kon
              Håkon Wium Lie                          CTO °þe®ª
howcome@opera.com                  http://people.opera.com/howcome

Received on Monday, 12 April 2010 01:43:26 UTC